The Amateurs (11 page)

In other sports several sources of power and authority existed for the great athlete. There was the college coach and then the professional coach. There was the agent. There were the media, which could cast glory upon the athlete rather than upon the coach, making the athlete inevitably freer and more independent of the coach. None of that was true of rowing. If in America and American sports, sources of authority in all walks of life had been divided as new sources of power arose, that was not true of rowing. The sources of power were frozen as they might have been fifty years ago. Harry Parker was not just the coach of the Harvard crew but he was often the coach of the national team, making him, in effect, both the college and the professional coach as well. Now he was the coach of the Olympic sculling team.

He was as much myth as man. His decisions, however arbitrary they might seem to disappointed oarsmen, had a finality that left those who questioned them outsiders. For almost twenty years no one ruled the sport as Harry Parker did. When Harvard was late to a race against Northeastern one year, the Northeastern coach, somewhat edgy, had asked where Parker was. The answer had been that Harry was walking over, but he would be a little late because he had tripped on a few boathouses on the way.

His nature did not encourage intimacy. Intimacy diminished his power as the distance he kept enhanced it. There were, as one of his oarsmen said, veils of privacy around him, and one did not lightly try to remove them. There was no Mr. Chips to him. He did not become buddies with his oarsmen even after they graduated, yet his pride in them was immense. He knew he was a central figure in their lives—indeed, often
the
central figure—but this did not mean they were close. For a long time he did not even go to the weddings of his former oarsmen, though by the mid-1970s he relaxed this policy. When one young bride, aware of how much this meant to her husband, that
Harry
had come to their wedding, had effusively thanked him, he had seemed surprised. "But this is where I should be this weekend," he had said.

He did not give emotional prerace speeches, and he did not exhort his crews for the greater glory of Harvard or the infamy of Yale. Members of one of his great Olympic crews could remember him coming up before the final and saying simply, "Well, there are a lot of good crews out there today, so if you want to win, you'll really have to dig in and get it." His crews did not go out on the water in a rah-rah manner to win one for good old Harry. Rather, they feared to measure up to his standards. His great triumph was that he forced his oarsmen to find what they were looking for within themselves. It was not that he was without emotion about the immense sacrifice and hardship that these young men endured; he simply could not easily express it. At the annual dinner of the Friends of Harvard Rowing, a fund raiser for the sport of Harvard at which he was always the principal speaker, he often broke into tears talking of what had happened in the previous year.

There was a genuine wariness about him, as if he were always on the alert for fraud or con. His eyes constantly measured the people around him, wondering what they really wanted and what price they would pay, whether they were as tough as he was. His face was weatherbeaten and rugged. This reporter looking at him, measuring him as he measured others, thought of him more likely as a great battalion commander. He was a ferocious competitor and he almost single-handedly had changed the nature of American rowing. Before his arrival, it had been a sport practiced from March through June each year. After his arrival, the Harvard crews practiced year-round; and when they soon ruled the sport, other crews practiced year-round as well. The force of his personality left nothing to challenge. What Harry said, went. He might have countless enemies outside Harvard, particularly around Philadelphia, a great center of rowing, and there might be anti-Parker feeling among men whose crews he had beaten or who had failed to make a national team he was coaching. But at Harvard, he was a law unto himself.

His crews pushed themselves because they were good and knew they were good, but also because Harry Parker pushed them. They were an extension of him and his ferocious desire to win. It was not so much what Harry said as what he didn't say. Harry did not just coach them, he competed with them. If their sport was in large measure in trying to find out what the human limits were, then Harry somehow was the self-appointed arbiter of those limits. He made the stadium runs with them, elbowing them if he thought he had a chance to edge ahead. If the Hobbs brothers, Bill and Fritz, were taking out a pair and if Harry was rowing against them in a single scull, there was no doubt that it was not just a workout but also a race that Harry did not intend to lose—and never did. When the Harvard crew went to New London to prepare for the four-mile race against Yale, they played, for lack of something better to do, croquet; and in these croquet games Parker was, in Shealy's words, "devious as hell—a notorious cheat, always changing the rules to suit his own situation." In the late 1970s one of his assistant coaches, a young man named Peter Raymond, had once gone to the stadium for a workout and Parker had suggested that they run together. Raymond, some fifteen years younger, realized in the middle of the workout that Parker was not just running with him but that he was also running against him, that he
had
to win. The intensity of Parker's drive had unnerved Raymond; it seemed so much invested in so little. On certain fall afternoons the Harvard and Boston University crews would practice together, and afterward they would have soccer games in which Harry Parker was the most violent player on the field, throwing elbows with abandon. One afternoon there was an air ball, and Harry and a B.U. player went for it at the same time and collided. Harry chipped a tooth in half but kept right on playing. He loved rowing against this crew in singles and could, in his midforties, beat most of them. Once he entered the Head of the Charles regatta under the name of T. Lazarus, the man who had come back from the dead. He was just as fanatic as a cross-country skier; in 1978, he entered a forty-kilometer cross-country ski meet in weather that never rose above ten below. At every checkpoint there were doctors looking for frostbite. Parker managed with great skill to keep his totally white ear from the view of the doctors. His competitiveness fed his team's competitiveness, and theirs fed his. Madness begot madness.

Most of these young men, coming as they did from affluent homes of comfort and kindness, had never before encountered a set of rules and standards so demanding and a man who so embodied those standards. Praise was rare from him, and because it was rare, it was all the more valued. Thus the less he said, the more his credibility increased. His strength was in his distance, the fact that they had to reach for him as he could not reach for them, and by reaching for him they met his standards. He dealt with them without con and manipulation. Tiff Wood believed he had too much respect for his oarsmen to play any games, to try to gain even a small advantage by either abusing or praising an oarsman. His praise was always careful. When the Rude and Smooth won victory after victory, its members began to debate among themselves whether they were the greatest crew in Harvard history, or at least the greatest crew Harry had coached. Even more, they wondered whether Harry would finally come out and say
it,
that this was the greatest crew he had ever coached. The previous standard, they knew, had been the 1967-68 crew, which had gone to the Olympics and had been favored to win a gold before several of its members became sick. By their junior year the Rude and Smooth members eagerly picked up every newspaper after each win to see whether Harry had finally said it. He never said it. He said other things, which by his standards were almost lavish, such as "that was a very well-rowed race today." But he never said the one thing they wanted.

Those who had rowed for him in college thought he was a perfectly situated man, coaching rowing at a school such as Harvard, dealing with proud, highly intelligent, self-motivated athletes. In a commercial world, he was able to create an environment where exceptional young men sacrificed themselves neither for love nor for money but for certain goals and a certain pride. The true victory for one of his oarsmen was not over the person next to you or the person in another boat but over his standards. Above all, he sensed why it was that they were amateurs, why they gave so much in a society that gave back so little reward. For his men, rowing was as much theology as sport; it was built entirely upon faith. The oarsman's self-esteem and membership in this elite circle depended completely on what he did; if he worked hard enough, he would be rewarded.

Parker seemed, if anything, somewhat out of tune with the latter part of this century. He was clearly highly intelligent, completely driven and very subtle. He was not a man to cross. His presence was austere and demanding. It was impossible to think of a profession—corporate management, academia, medicine—where he would not have risen to the very top. Yet he had remained a coach, poorly paid by contemporary standards, in a spot far from the center of contemporary athletic excitement. But he loved what he did and never found himself bored. There was nothing he might covet that he did not have, no other person he would rather be. The only time he had felt his lack of affluence had come a few years earlier, when he had got divorced and it had become clear to him how little money he made compared to what comparably successful and driven men made. But that reaction quickly passed.

The greatest role model in his life, Joe Burk, the coach at Penn, had done the same thing, and he was, he knew, in many ways the lineal descendant of Joe Burk. Burk was a man of a less complicated time, when there were more rules and fewer opportunities to break them. He was born in 1914 and had been a great oarsman as both a sweep oar and a sculler. He had graduated from Penn and gone to work on the family fruit farm in New Jersey. He worked the farm during the week, and on weekends he drove to nearby regattas, took his scull off his car, went out and rowed and won, put his scull back on his car and drove back to his farm. He did not sit around and talk with the other rowing buffs and have a drink with them. He had no need for that. He was a loner, completely independent, largely self-taught as an oarsman (though later it turned out he had corresponded with George Pocock, the great oarsman and builder of sculls in Seattle).

Burk believed that every oarsman had to find out what felt right for himself. He favored the sheer use of power, while traditionalists such as Pocock spoke of rowing as a symphony of motion. Burk believed there was too much emphasis on technique, as if finesse alone had some mystical capacity to move boats. What moved boats were power and endurance. He was in perfect condition; the farm was just far enough south to allow him to row year-round. In the summer he liked to row up Rancocas Creek to the Delaware River, where he usually encountered big weekend powerboats. He would sprint against them, delighting in the bewildered voices of those aboard who could not understand how this little boat with one man rowing could keep ahead of them. Most scullers in those days raced at about twenty-eight strokes to the minute, a pace that permitted perfect form but was low in terms of energy. In about 1936, Joe Burk went to a much higher number of strokes, thirty-six, and every year after that, he took it up a stroke or two until he was racing at forty-two, turning races into sprints. In the late 1930s he was the best sculler in America, quite possibly in the world; he had come in second during the 1936 American trials when he was only twenty-two, and for a period of about four years he did not lose a single race. Everyone assumed he would be the Olympic champion in 1940 and 1944, but there were no Olympics in those years. Parker considered him the perfect amateur. When an Australian sculler named Bobby Pearce, who had won the Olympics in both 1928 and 1932, challenged him to some races, Burk declined. He wanted to meet Pearce, but he had a powerful sense that the events would not be as clean as they should, that too much was going to be bet, as had happened in sculling challenges in the 1870s. Rowing should be done only for its own sake.

In 1951, he was hired to coach at Penn. He was an oddly formal man; he wore three-piece suits and kept his distance from most of his athletes. Coaching a winning crew was a serious business, his manner implied. There were curfew hours, and his crews would keep them. When Harry Parker as a sophomore told a boatmate that it would be all right to stay up an additional hour, Burk was furious with Parker. How dare Parker do this? How dare he put himself above Burk's rules? A year later, one of the varsity oarsmen was immediately demoted to the jayvee boat for drinking a few beers. When the Penn crews went to West Germany, they were not allowed to drink Coke at receptions because it was carbonated, nor could they imbibe spirits even after their last triumphant victory. Joe Burk did not want people's final memory of his athletes to be one of noisy young Americans careening drunkenly through hotel chambers. There were dress codes, ties and jackets to be worn and, later, in the 1960s, hair codes (he used a dowel to check hair length). He set weight limits for his athletes and weighed them once a week. If they were over their appointed weight, they ran three or four miles. If, at the end of the winter, there was a question whether the water was too cold to row on (in case something happened and a boat sank), Joe Burk settled the question by diving in the water.

In 1953, Harry Parker, then eighteen years old, walked into Joe Burk's world. Parker came from East Hartford, Connecticut, on a naval scholarship. He wanted badly to be an athlete but had always lacked the requisite natural skills. He had played basketball in high school, but to no great advantage. When he registered on his first day at Penn, the crew coaches standing in line behind the Penn administrators were eyeing any young man who was six feet tall and suggesting that he might want to row. Harry Parker paid no attention until he reached the end of the line, where another Penn administrator asked him whether he was going to take phys-ed courses or a sport. "I'm going to be a rower," he immediately announced. "The tanks are down that way," said the man, pointing to the bowels of the athletic building. So he became a rower.